By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

Trump and Borders

US
presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign promises that, if elected, he will
build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border
wall” along the 3,100 km US-Mexico border is, in historical perspective, not an
anomaly, but reflective of a significant global geopolitical trend (“How
realistic,” 2016). As Thomas Nail (2016) points out in his recent study of the
border: “In the last twenty years, but particularly since 9/11, hundreds of new
borders have emerged around the world: miles of new razor-wire fences, tons of
new concrete security walls, numerous offshore detention centers, biometric
passport databases, and security checkpoints of all kinds in schools, airports,
and along various roadways across the world” (p. 1). Following the fall of the
Berlin Wall, and especially since the refugee crisis that erupted in 2015,
European nations have constructed or began constructing “almost 1,200 km of
anti-immigrant fencing … That distance is almost 40 percent of the length of
America’s border with Mexico” (Baczynska and Ledwith, 2016). As Mohdin and
Collins (2016) recently enumerated:

“In 2015 alone,
Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria all started construction or
announced plans to build fences. In the last two months, Norway has begun
construction of a steel fence at a remote Arctic border post with Russia to
deter migration. France, with British funding, is the latest to build its own
wall — near the so-called makeshift refugee camp known as the Jungle. It has
been dubbed the ‘Great Wall of Calais.’”

Trump’s
proposed US-Mexico border wall was itself inspired by Israel’s 700 km
separation barrier from the Palestinian West Bank, which is “the largest
infrastructure project in Israel's history.” While the Palestinians see the
barrier as an “apartheid wall,” the Israelis see it as an “anti-terrorist fence,”
and Trump views it as a “successful … security fence” that has helped Israel
“secure its borders” (Jacobs, 2016; Zonszein, 2014).

Given
the heightened rhetoric and activities concerning borders, it is timely to
reflect on the nature of borders. Korf and Raeymaekers (2013) remind us that borders
are “key sites of contestation and negotiation” within and between states. While
states establish borders to fix their territories, the distribution of borders
reflects the distribution of power within each state. Illegal or anti-state
activities that occur in border regions “implicitly and explicitly call into
question the legitimacy of states and their pretences to control an illusionary
cartography of territory and population, and the legitimate use of violence
therein” (p. 5). Frustration with human and narcotics trafficking across the
US-Mexico border has raised popular support for Trump, while in Europe fears of
terrorism — which were validated by the infiltration of Islamic State terrorists
among Syrian refugees — have intensified the populist backlash against refugees
and immigrants (Nabeel and Bhatti, 2016; Wike, Stokes, and Simmons, 2016; “Rancher
yearns,” 2016).

In
the third presidential debate, Trump highlighted the existence of a major bordering
practice that exists within US territory, namely arrests and deportations of
criminal undocumented immigrants, which under the Obama administration numbered
over 2.5 million deportees (Palma, 2016; Woodruff, 2016). As Jones and Johnson (2014)
point out, people “encounter borders in their multiple locations in their daily
lives” (p. 6). This is because borders “are no longer entirely situated at the
outer limit of territories” and have become diffused within the borders of the
state, “wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening
and is controlled” (Balibar, 2003, p. 1). Balibar’s concept of the diffuse
border supplements Deleuze’s (1992) account of contemporary society possessing
elaborately modulated controls for migration and movement that resemble “a
sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (p. 4). In the case of the
US and the world’s other advanced economies, such modulated controls include
biometric passports and other identification documents which allow their
security apparatuses to quickly distinguish non-citizens who are in the
territory legally from those who are not. Such technologies have had to be
developed to help the governments “cope with the risks inherent to the
increasing mobility of humans and goods by patrolling beyond and within the
territorial boundaries of the state” (Johnson and Jones, 2014, p. 5). These
technologies in turn strengthen the power of the state, increasing its ability
to organize “people and things into discrete areas” and manage their “social,
economic, and political” lives (Agnew, 2009, p. 30).

Borders have become diffused
within the borders of the state, “wherever the movement of information, people,
and things is happening and is controlled.”

The
economic life of a people may also be affected by borders and bordering
practices. Communities which depend on remittances from undocumented immigrants
working in the US may expect to be devastated should the US government seek to
expel their breadwinners from the country. More broadly, borders serve as
“connective tissue” that allow people to cross “scales (local, national,
regional, global) through their everyday practices,” such that people may experience
the border “as a ‘local’ phenomenon, a nation-state ‘edge,’ or as a
transnational staging post, thereby allowing them to experience the border as a
conduit” (Cooper, Perkins and Rumford, 2014, pp. 19-20). Globalization treats
borders as transnational staging posts through which the transnational supply
chains of multinational companies flow through. However, should Trump’s
anti-globalization agenda bring him electoral success, his supporters will
expect him to re-modulate the immigration and customs controls at the US border
to increase the costs borne by transnational supply chains, and to restrict the
cross-border movement of labor, thereby disrupting the uninterrupted flows of
capital, goods, and people that are necessary for the smooth operations of
globalization (Lim, 2016).

Tsing
(2005) has famously found that global connections emerge from “sticky
engagements” or “friction” between individuals, and that “the effects of
encounters across difference can be compromising or empowering.” Unhappy
encounters may range from “everyday malfunctions” to “unexpected cataclysms”
(p. 6). One such unexpected cataclysm was the November 2015 terrorist strike on
Paris, which involved Islamic State terrorists who had entered Europe disguised
as Syrian refugees (Faiola and Mekhennet, 2016). This and other terrorist
attacks have, as was noted earlier, given rise to anti-immigrant public
sentiment in Europe and prompted several governments in the region to impose
tighter controls on their borders. Refugee populations have also experienced
state violence as a result of the anti-immigrant backlash, including the recent
closing and demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, France (Chazan,
2016; Mallinder, 2016). Such violence reflects Elden’s (2009) observation that
“creating a bounded space is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion;
maintaining it as such requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of
threat; and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression.” The violence that
gives the state control over its territory “is what makes a state possible,” and
its control of territory “accords a specific legitimacy to the violence and
determines its spatial extent” (p. xxx). However, in the current anti-immigrant
zeitgeist, immigrant groups may also experience violence triggered by
politicians and other “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” whose divisive rhetoric
creates a “powerful crystallization of group feeling” which pits local or
native populations against immigrant groups (Brubaker, 2002, pp. 166-167). Such
rhetoric may be understood as an informal bordering practice which highlights
the presence of undocumented immigrants within the state’s borders and which
may then identify them as targets for state or vigilante violence. The escalating
tensions arising from the increasingly bitter US presidential campaign may yet mark
a watershed in the global movement to tighten borders.

Elden,
S. (2009). Terror and Territory: The Spatial
Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Faiola,
A., and Mekhennet, S. (2016, April 22). Tracing the path of four terrorists
sent to Europe by the Islamic State. Washington
Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-europes-migrant-crisis-became-an-opportunity-for-isis/2016/04/21/ec8a7231-062d-4185-bb27-cc7295d35415_story.html

Johnson,
C., and Jones, R. (2014). Where is the border? In R. Jones and C. Johnson
(Eds.), Placing the Border in Everyday
Life (pp. 1-13). Farnham: Ashgate.

Korf,
B., and Raeymaekers, T. (2013) Introduction: Border, frontier and the geography
of Rrule at the margins of the state. In B. Korf and T. Raeymaekers (Eds.), Violence on the Margins: States, Conflict,
and Borderlands (pp. 3-27). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mohdin,
A., and Collins, K. (2016, October 10). This is what happens when we build
walls and fences to keep people out. Quartz.
Retrieved from
http://qz.com/783678/this-is-what-happens-when-we-build-walls-and-fences-to-keep-people-out/

Nabeel,
G., and Bhatti, J. (2016, July 14). Refugees in Europe say they fear terrorists
are among them. USA Today. Retrieved
from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/07/14/refugees-europe-say-they-fear-terrorists-among-them/87008334/

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.